Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinegel and I'm

glad you're listening today. There's been a simmering debate in the medical community

not to mention the popular press over whether it's time to stop making weight loss the primary

goal of obesity treatment. Obesity, as you probably know, is a disease state that's defined

by having a BMI, a body mass index of more than 30. Okay, but what's that mean in actual numbers?

Well, I'm 5 foot 9 inches tall. That's 175 centimeters. And at 150 pounds, I'm considered normal weight.

At 170 pounds, that would be 77 kilograms. I would be classified as overweight. And if my weight

crept above 200 pounds or 91 kilograms, I would then be classified as obese. Most people

suffering from obesity would be a lot healthier if they lost weight. The problem is that many

or even most of them don't succeed in losing weight even when they really try to.

Now, we can debate why people are so unsuccessful in these attempts. We can blame the diets,

the environment, the food supply, the media. Many are tempted to blame the people suffering

from obesity for simply being unwilling to do what they need to do. And you know what,

all of this finger pointing and the competing solutions that arise from it isn't solving the

problem. A large and growing percentage of our population, including our children, now suffers

from seemingly intractable obesity and all the health risks that go with that.

If we can't actually help people lose weight, maybe we should focus instead on what else we

can do to reduce those health risks. Or that's how the argument goes. In a paper published last

month, Glenn Gasser and Siddhartha Angadi argue for a weight neutral strategy for the treatment

of obesity. And then to support this argument, the authors present data from over 100

individual studies and meta-analyses on the relationships between weight loss, exercise,

disease risks, and mortality. And they point out that achieving a moderate to high level of physical

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